Al-Qaeda leader captured

The operation was as swift as it was inevitable. The whereabouts of the man known as Abu Anas al-Libi had been reported to Western intelligence officials more than a year ago as he followed a regular routine from his Tripoli home.

One of America's most wanted men, with a $US5million ($5.3 million) price on his head, was living within two kilometres of the former, now ransacked British Embassy.

According to one report, the Libyan government, under its former leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, had even given out his address to those who asked.

Abdullah al-Raghie (R) and Abdul Moheman al-Raghie (L), the sons of al-Qaeda suspect Abu Anas al-Libi, show the car from which their father was taken by US special forces. Photo: AFP

That freedom ended at dawn on Saturday. He was driving back from morning prayers to his villa in the upmarket eastern suburb of Noufleen when the American "Delta Force" special operations unit pounced, as his wife watched from the window.

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"I saw the cars stop him. They took his pistol and then they put a bag on his head and pushed him into a car," she said. His brother, Abdulbaset, who relayed her account to the London Telegraph, did not give her name, in keeping with conservative local custom.

Within a few hours al-Libi had been spirited out of the country. The Pentagon would not say where he was being held but there are US navy warships within helicopter range in the Mediterranean and US military bases in southern Italy.

Anas al-Liby in an undated FBI handout photo.

The operation to capture al-Libi, whose real name is Nazih Abdulhamed al-Ruqaie, began 15 years earlier, when he was living in exile in Manchester.

Investigators looking into the bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 7, 1998, believed he was one of the operation's planners.

Al-Libi fled Britain in 1999 and his seizure on Saturday was his next confirmed sighting. But reports had reached Western officials last year that he had moved back to Libya during or even before the 2011 uprising against Gaddafi's rule and was moving freely around the capital. One of his sons had been killed in the fighting in Tripoli in August of that year.

At the time of the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi last September which killed the ambassador, Christopher Steven, al-Libi was suspected of helping to re-establish al-Qaeda in post-Gaddafi Libya.

He now lived with his wife and one of his sons, Abdullah. It was outside their home that the operation to seize him moved into gear on Saturday morning.

Abdulbaset al-Ruqaie said his brother was parking his car outside the house when three or four SUV-type cars screeched in and surrounded him.

Five men emerged wearing balaclavas and smashed the car's side window.

They managed to grab his weapon - not an unusual item for Libyan men to carry in the chaotic post-Gaddafi years - and pull him out and into their own convoy before speeding off.

Mr al-Ruqaie said that at first he thought al-Libi had been a victim of one of the numerous feuds between competing militias, some Islamist, who are vying for power in Libya.

"I thought it was a kind of misunderstanding between the brigades," he said. "I thought it was a normal Libyan kidnap, not that it was American commandos."

The truth was not confirmed by the US authorities until almost 24 hours later. "As the result of a US counterterrorism operation, Abu Anas al-Libi is currently lawfully detained by the US military in a secure location outside of Libya," a Pentagon spokesman said.

The fact that the operation happened at almost exactly the same time another raid, by US Navy Seals, was taking place on an al-Qaeda base in coastal Somalia was described as "coincidence". There was no immediate suggestion that al-Libi was in contact with al-Shabaab, the Somali branch of al-Qaeda.

Al-Libi's son, Abdullah, said his father had been preparing to launch a formal legal case to determine his innocence and prevent his extradition to the United States.

He said his father had worked in the oil industry after returning to Libya.

"This operation was committed by the government," he said. "There is no difference between this government and Gaddafi. It should leave as Gaddafi left."

Like him, Hashem al-Bishr, head of the government-backed Supreme Security Council, also claimed that the men who seized al-Libi were Libyan, though led by an American.

A spokesman for Ali al-Zeidan, the prime minister, denied that the government was involved in or had been informed of the arrest. Mr Zeidan is already under attack from Islamists for being too close to the United States.

Washington welcomed what it said was a further success in its campaign to eliminate al-Qaeda's top leadership.

"We hope that this makes clear that the United States of America will never stop in the effort to hold those accountable who conduct acts of terror," John Kerry, the secretary of state, said.